Almost a third of U.S. Marines smoke. Chris Hondros/Getty Images If you missed a story or two of ours this week, don't sweat it. From ancient Babylonian trigonometry to a gelatinous colony of tiny creatures, this roundup of our best podcasts and articles will catch you up. Keep reading to learn something new! The Surprising The Caspian Sea is shrinking. It's done so before, thanks to various agricultural practices. But this time, scientists are pointing their fingers at climbing temperatures. Find out how climate change is causing the lake's water to evaporate in this new article. Considering how loyal, friendly and adorable our pet pups are, they deserve to have their own homes, right? Well, at least millennials think so — many are buying houses to give their dogs room to roam, as BrainStuff host Christian Sager explains in this episode of the podcast. A recent Truth Initiative campaign … [Read more...]

A rare 1969 Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona Berlinetta was found after sitting in a barn in Japan for more than 40 years. RM Sotheby's Talk about a lucky barn find: An ultra-rare 1969 Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona Berlinetta was sitting in a barn in Japan for more than 40 years. Nobody knew it even existed. The car was shipped to Japan from Italy in 1971 and then ended up in owner Makoto Takai's barn sometime in the early '80s where it sat, gathering dust for four decades. And this isn't just a rare Ferrari: It's the only one of its kind to ever be made. Apparently, only a few diehard Ferrari enthusiasts even knew it existed — everyone else thought it was just a myth. Sure, Ferrari produced more than 1,200 of the 365 GTB/4 Daytonas between 1969 and 1973, but this one is the only street version with a full aluminum body, and it's estimated to be worth as much as $2 million. Car enthusiasts the world over will be clamoring to … [Read more...]

One company's discarded orange peels turned out to be pretty fruitful for a degraded plot of Costa Rican pasture. Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs Imagine if some of Earth's most barren wastelands could be transformed into dense, productive forests by the most unlikely of helpers: discarded fruit peels. It sounds like wishful thinking, but that's exactly what happened in the 1990s during a promising ecological experiment. Orange juice manufacturer Del Oro plunked 12,000 metric tons (13,228 tons) of orange peels on top of bleak Costa Rican pastureland, eventually transforming it into a lush, fertile forest. But it's a success story that almost wasn't told. Del Oro donated a 7-acre (3-hectare) plot on the edge of the Guanacaste Conservation Area after being approached by University of Pennsylvania researchers Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, who wondered how the company's discarded orange peels could benefit the soil. … [Read more...]

Former FLDS leader Warren Jeffs (seen second from left with his legal council) was convicted in September 2007 on two counts of being an accomplice to rape, related to the arranged marriage and rape of a 14-year-old girl in 2001. The minor-aged bride was awarded a $16 million lawsuit against the group on Sept. 6, 2017. AFP/Getty Images It seems unthinkable that children are still getting married in 21st-century America. Yet, it's happening in every corner of the country, regardless of state politics, popular opinion or moral leanings. And it occurs more often than we realize, to children younger than we might believe. Perhaps most shockingly, it's happening in ways that are perfectly legal. "Child marriage is a significant problem in America," Fraidy Reiss, founder and executive director of Unchained at Last, says in an email. Her nonprofit agency promotes social, policy and legal change to child marriage, and helps women escape forced … [Read more...]

A staff member of CLEAR (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility) describes various documents U.S. resident foreigners and Green Card holders need when entering the U.S. Could gender be eliminated from these documents one day? Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images When Dana Zzyym was born in 1958, the hospital left the "sex" entry on the birth certificate blank. That's because Dana, like an estimated 0.05 to 1.7 percent of the world's population, was born intersex. Their physical traits at birth weren't clearly male or female, but something else (Dana uses the pronouns "they," "them" and "their"). Dana was raised as a boy, but only after painful, unnecessary, and ultimately unsuccessful surgeries to "correct" their genitalia. Dana served six years in the U.S. Navy as a man, after which they decided to identify as intersex and take up the cause of intersex activism to protect other children from traumatic medical procedures. … [Read more...]

A 3-D satellite image of the Caspian Sea shows its placement between Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Russia. Planet Observer/UIG/Getty Images When the ancient Romans arrived at the Caspian Sea a couple thousand years ago, they thought they'd arrived at an ocean. That's because it the water was salty. Nope! Sorry, Romans. Nestled amongst modern day Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Iran, the Caspian Sea actually is the world's largest lake. Its waters are brackish — about a third as salty as most ocean water — because, though water finds its way into it from about 130 different freshwater sources, it has no outlet. If water is going to escape the Caspian Sea, it's got to do it through evaporation. So, it's strange that the water level of the Caspian Sea has been steadily dropping for the past couple of decades. Between 1996 and 2015, the sea has been drawn down about 3 inches (7 cm) per year — … [Read more...]

A young woman leans on a car during the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in Miami. Andrew was a Category 5 hurricane that hit South Florida in 1992. Steve Starr/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images On Aug. 18, 1969, Hurricane Camille made landfall along the Gulf Coast of the United States as a Category 5 hurricane, the strongest storm on Earth. Hurricanes are rated by wind speed and the damage they inflict, with Category 5 defined as sustained winds of 157 mph (252 kph) or greater, strong enough to flatten even well-built homes and send debris flying like airborne missiles. Camille had winds as high as 175 mph (282 kph). Camille was Ruth Clark's first hurricane. The then-23-year-old native of Richton, Mississippi, 70 miles inland from the Gulf Coast, took shelter in her church's partial basement, huddled with her husband and neighbors as the storm tore straight through her hometown. Hours earlier, at the Trinity Episcopal Church in coastal Pass … [Read more...]

Research has shown that white people are more closely associated with American identity than are minority groups, but a new study suggests gender moderates views of "Americanness," too. John Moore / Getty Images If asked to name some particularly "American" attributes, you might go the old baseball-and-apple-pie route — classic, but not exactly descriptive. But if you dig a little deeper to tap into who, not just what, people see as American, things can get a lot murkier. It might come as little surprise that people, including nonwhite people, often view ethnic minorities as less American than whites, and minorities recognize that's the case. After all, there's a long history in America of minority groups being socially and politically marginalized. But according to new research, it's not just minorities who are seen as less American — more than half of the American population is. And what is it that makes them less American, … [Read more...]

Not everyone uses a computer keyboard for the same purpose and with the same predictable patterns, affecting demand for different replacement keys. Westend61/Getty Images If you spend a lot of time using a computer, you've undoubtedly noticed that over time, some of the letters on your keyboard start to disappear. That leads to the question: Which keys on a keyboard tend to wear out the fastest? Since keys wear out because of use, it's logical to assume that the keys that wear out the fastest are the ones we use most heavily. So which ones are they? Back in the days before computers, when typewriters and typesetting machines were used to put words on paper, that was a fairly easily question to answer. As a trade publication called The Inland Printer noted back in 1898, it was widely accepted that the most-used key on keyboards was the space bar, followed by the letter E. Some sources still adhere to that convention. A Microsoft product … [Read more...]

Hurricane Irma was the strongest hurricane to ever form in the open Atlantic. It was able to sustain winds of 185 mph (297 kph) for 35 hours. NOAA When hurricane season arrives each year on June 1, phrases such as "storm surge," "wind speed," and "eyewall" suddenly become part of the summer lexicon in the United States. But probably the most important words to know about a hurricane are those that describe its power — and those include whether it's a Category 1 or a Category 5. The variance between the strengths of these two storms could mean the difference between life and death. Meteorologists rank hurricanes from one to five based on the Saffir-Simpson scale. The scale is a yardstick that takes into account a hurricane's wind speed, storm surge and air pressure. The scale begins with a Category 1, the least powerful and dangerous hurricane, and moves towards its climax at Category 5 — the most catastrophic. But how did the … [Read more...]